Monday, January 26, 2015

Death by celebrity

It has taken the Slovakian pop group Sponvika three years to come to terms with the tremendous success of their debut album, which sold millions of copies all over Europe. The sudden superstar status of singer Josip Dvorak led to severe arguments within the group, a number of cancelled tours, and repeated postponement of the studio sessions of their second album. Well, that album finally arrived on my desk yesterday, and the title, obviously meant to be ironic, is unfortunately quite to the point. Gone are the catchy rhythms and beautiful tunes, and there is not much else that has come in its place. A pity.

The idea of this little game is to create an album cover for an imaginary artist/group, as well as an imaginary review, following these instructions:

[1] The artist/group: go to the wiki random page generator. The first random Wikipedia article obtained this way is the name of the band or performer. In this case, I ended up with Sponvika.

[2] The title: go to the random quotations site. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of the album (from 2014 onward: any part of a random quotation will do). The random quote that came up was by Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine: Here's a tip to avoid death by celebrity: First off, get a life. They can't touch you if you're out doing something interesting.

[3] The illustration: pick a suitable one from my Flickr collection. My picture, The long sleep, can be found here on Flickr. The on-line editing was done with the programme On-line image editor, the font settings selected were Algerian 35 black and Madison Square Incised 50 black, respectively.

Note: this is a variation on the "Debut album game" that has been making its rounds around bulletin boards and blogs for some time now - the original version called for a random Flickr Explore photograph to be used as the cover. I have been trying to find out who had the original idea, but so far no success.

The Blogger

About me:Dutchman, married to a beautiful and highly talented artist from Shanghai. Although my education (PhD chemistry) is very much associated with the left side of the brain, I like to use my right side for my hobbies: music, art, photography.

About this blog:I started this blog in August 2006, just wanting to share what I considered interesting pieces of visual art and music. I suffered from blogging blues for most of 2008, but making a fresh start in October of that year has done wonders for my inspiration.In case you did not notice, most posts end with a small symbol... just click that for the relevant link.All pictures in my blog are hosted on blogger - if some do not show up (the red cross syndrome) it is a blogger hiccup. Right click and selecting "show picture" should do the trick.

About the reconstruction:

End March 2017 I converted thousands of posts to draft, in order to sort out potential copyright issues. Many of these have been restored in the course of the year.

Links of interest

Reactions

Reactions: please send an email to artrock2006@gmail.com or leave a comment on FaceBook.

Copyright issues?

Most of the images used in this blog are either mine, or they are used with explicit permission of the creators, or they are in the public domain. Album cover and movie poster images are sourced on the internet and they are considered fair use for discussion at a non-profit blog.

The magnifying glass based images that occur once in a while have been put in place to show images at thumbnail size, this being considered fair use (link).

If you still find a picture on this blog that you are the copyright owner of, and object against the use, please drop me an email and I will remove it.